Tassie's Hartshorn Take The Wraps Off Whey-Sky

Tasmanian sheep whey distillery Hartshorn have today announced their first ‘Whey-sky’, a three-year-old whey spirit matured in ex-sherry casks.

Hartshorn is one of Australia’s most unique spirit producers, the micro-distillery based underneath the Grandewe farm and cheesery in Birchs Bay. Believed to be the first distillery globally to distil from sheep whey, head distiller Ryan Hartshorn has won international recognition for his vodka and gin. In 207 the vodka was named Champion Vodka at the World Vodka Awards.

The Whey-sky release is a double-pot distilled whey spirit, in which tighter whisky-style spirit cuts were implemented. It was aged in 20 litre sherry barrels for three years before being bottled at 60%. Batch 1 has resulted in just 64 bottles. Being an experimental line for the distillery’s production, batch two is not expected to come to maturity until 2022.

Although the spirit meets whisky’s ageing requirements, the Australian legal definition of whisky states that it must be distilled from “a mash of cereal grain” and possess “the taste, aroma and other characteristics generally attributed to whisky.” Coming from a dairy base, this release is not technically whisky.